Latest News

Cross-Industry Pressure Builds for ‘Demand Response’ Energy Reform

A broad range of Australian business and industry representatives have written a letter supporting changes to the country’s energy rules that would allow demand response aggregators to enter the National Energy Market.

The Australia Institute released new research showing Adani is not “ready to go” with its Carmichael coal mine and there are a number of significant reasons why Adani is not ready to proceed with its mine.

62 scientists and experts have signed an open letter to the next Parliament of Australia, calling for whichever party that wins Government this Saturday to make urgent action on climate change a top priority for the 46th Parliament of Australia.

The Revenue Summit is a special initiative of The Australia Institute that discussed the need to increase public spending to strengthen our economy and society, and how to raise public revenue efficiently and equitably.

Tax is the price we pay to live in a civilised society, but in contemporary Australia, we rarely ask how much civilisation we would like to buy and what the best new ways way to fund any increase in civilisation might be.

Below you will find all research papers on company tax cuts produced by The Australia Institute to date [updated 25.06.18]

The big four banks get an extra $7.4 billion dollars:

Australia’s big four banks are some of the most profitable banks in the world and are the big winners here, getting an extra $7.4 billion dollars in the first 10 years of the tax cuts when they’re already making record profits. By the 2025–26 financial year, the tax cuts for the big four banks will be $3.2 billion every year.

With the House of Representatives set to commence debate on marriage equality, The Australia Institute and the National LGBTI Health Alliance have released preliminary* results of an a major survey into the stress impacts associated with the Australian marriage equality debate during the lead up to the postal survey results announcement.

More than 9,500 LGBTIQ people and their allies (friends, family etc.) participated in the self-selecting survey which investigated stress as a result of exposure to negative messages about LGBTIQ people and same-sex marriage and how people responded to this.

The South Australian state government announced in late June 2017 that it was going to follow the Federal government and introduce a levy on the big banks. Episode 19 of Follow The Money, explains why the banks can absolutely afford the levy, why it's a good idea economically and just how small the levy really is compared to -- for example -- the salaries of the CEOs of the big 4 banks.

Australian governments are proposing to fund and build billions of dollars’ worth of new electricity generation capacity as the solution to our energy security crisis

Regardless of whether investments like Snowy 2.0 or ideas for ‘clean’ coal power stations go ahead, these supply-side solutions will require many years to build and will have no impact on security of supply next summer (2017-18).

Luckily, there are demand-side solutions that use energy more wisely, which could potentially secure hundreds of MW of supply headroom this year.

Pages

The Australia Institute is the country’s most influential progressive think tank. We conduct research on a broad range of economic, social and environmental issues in order to inform public debate and bring greater accountability to the democratic process.